wclem wrote:I honestly never researched if XP will recognize SATA or if the PCI-e video cards would even have drivers for XP or even earlier Windows versions. My whole thought process was sticking to things I was fairly certain would play well with older versions of windows. I want to build this for older games mainly. So I can play them as-is rather than trying to hunt down patches or running into tons of problems running it on 7 or 10. Want to boot 98 for 98 compatible games and boot XP for XP compatibles games. Hopefully with little patching or tweaking involved.
Anyway, NBA Jam Extreme refuses to run in windows 10, and damn it I want to play it LOL.
Windows XP supports SATA and PCI-e I downgraded a used Tower from thrift store to Windows XP Pro even going 32 bit install for the older games. At first was going to install IDE drive from my older tower, noticed the SATA connector inside. Went with Win XP max size 2tb SATA C drive which boots just fine. Also installed a PCI-e video card; an older just to sure of XP drivers. All my Win 95 games work just fine in Win XP 32 bit which has all 3 Service Packs Slipstreamed installed.
Which was my basic concern, just worded wrong. Remember, when I started out plug and play wasn't a phrase yet lol. Also, around xp years a didn't have money to keep up with tech so have small holes in knowledge of it
dsheinem wrote:In any case, sorry that my avatar makes you cringe these days, but I haven't really changed my posing habits at all.
To be fair, Windows XP really only natively supports SATA and PCIe by virtue of their compatibility modes. SATA can typically be set to Legacy/IDE mode, where most anything that works with IDE will work with it, and that's all XP will work with out of the box. Fully utilizing it via AHCI/SATA native modes requires a driver. Vista, on the other hand, shipped with support for that. Similarly, PCIe is accessible to the OS the same as PCI is, making basic functionality very compatible. The full feature set, however, requires additional support, and again for Windows, Vista was the first to have that out of the box (and it changed the driver model, etc). XP support via drivers is very common, but it's not baked into the OS.
I believe the driver support page I PM’ed you earlier should include chipset drivers for things like full SATA, full PCIe, fullspeed USB 2.0, and all the rest. Just update the chipset drivers first, and you should be all good.
I don't know if I ever talked about my dual-boot DOS/98SE tower here. If I did, it was probably WIP. I had great success except getting my video card working in Windows 3.11, and corrupting my bios chip while reflashing. Both painful, but the latter was fixed by a great bios flashing guru type.
I feel like one of those guys who lists their specs in their signature, except this is circa 1999. I guess I'm still kinda proud of it. It does play Diablo II. Specs:
MOBO: Abit - BF6 (Chosen because of all the retro support via bios as well as riser pentium CPU support)
CPU: Intel Pentium III
RAM: 192Mb (3rd slot does not work & hard to source matching speed ram to those two chips)
Video: ATI All-In-Wonder 128 PRO AGP 4X (this is actually surprisingly more compatible in DOS than a handful of others I wanted to use - the demoscene stuff requires a lot of timing compatibility to older cards.) I wasn't able to install a secondary PCI card.
Audio: CT2770 SoundBlaster 16 Value PnP
60GB IDE hard drive triple-partitioned. 2GB DOS, 53GB Windows 98SE, 2GB Shared.
Partitioning took a bit of doing because my motherboard did not like the job any utility I tried in Windows or Linux - The sector count is the same, and the desired partitions looked identical to the ones made in Windows using an IDE to USB3 adapter and fully fledged partitioning GUIs (I prefer Paragon's software). I ended up doing everything off a bootable CD utility and then using FDisk in dos to initialize. After the initial partitions were built, I was able to use my main tower through USB3 to populate the partitions with data. The 2GB is a hard limit by DOS, the Shared drive is where I store media. I'm able to move data between the partitions using it without involving outside computers or devices. USB Mass Storage only works in Windows no matter what I try in DOS.
Multiboot via PLOP: I tried a few boot managers before I settled on Plop. Most work well, but after figuring out how small, easy, and effective Plop is I'l easily recommending it over the 6 others I've previously used and tried. Mostly it just pre-boots and marks different partitions hidden making them invisible to other operating systems. It's just really good at it, and tho I've never needed to use it, it's recovery is also robust. Also it's a GUI with a starfield and green graphical-font text (those are optional).
DOS: I ignored several angry forum posts and used the unofficial DOS 7.1 (pirate installer). It works great. I selectively chose to not install some of it, but I like that it gave the option. Apparently it was built by some Chinese DOS enthusiasts to make room for their keyboards and language addons. I love the crash-override TSR that just boots you back to dos instead of hanging your computer. LFN support is togglable and it doesn't interfere with any games I tried.
As far as getting any hardware working correctly in DOS, I would've been completely lost several times if not for Vogons and VogonsDrivers. I wish I spent more time contributing there compared to how much I lurked and leeched. I did have a few specific problems with my audio and video cards that required specific information only found on specific sites. Luckily some people catalog everything.
Early DOS games built with Turbo Pascal require fixes when running on Pentium processors. The 200 error is well known, but the specific procedure to fix it best using the utilities available isn't as well known -200fix guide200fix ZIP This stuff got my DOS working well - I'd be happy to answer questions, and PM me if you need some support files. Because I spent so many years hanging on to Windows 9X before fully jumping to XP, and because a large part of my obsession with computers is optimising them and making them do what they shouldn't be able to I've only just outlined the first part of my build. I'll post some stuff about the 98SE Unofficial update pack. I'd suggest you back up your boot drive and read through the main forum topic completely (it's very long, but you will have at least one of those problems) before applying it a piece at a time. Totally worth it tho if you don't mind a longer startup.
